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Session 45 - Interstellar Medium I.
Display session, Tuesday, January 16
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
Spangler and Reynolds compared H-alpha intensities, measured using the Wisconsin Fabry-Perot interferometer, with radio-wave scattering sizes of eight extragalactic sources along low-latitiude lines of sight. They find that some correlation exists between scattering and H-alpha intensity, as one might expect. However, the H-alpha observations were made with a 50^\prime beam size; higher resolution observations might provide a more accurate measure of the intensity along the scattering line of sight. We made sensitive, arcminute resolution H-alpha images of the same fields to upgrade the accuracy of their results. We find that many of their measured H-alpha intensities are accurate, but some of the higher intensities are biased upward by the presence of clumped emission. Appropriate reduction of these large intensities increases the degree of correlation between scattering and H-alpha intensity, thus strengthening their original conclusions. This work is a first step towards using our spectral-line imaging system for a more extensive study of the relationship between the warm ionized medium and scattering of radio waves. This research was supported by NSF grant AST-9319670 and a grant from the Horton Foundation to Virginia Tech.
